"None of us are virgins, you know," confides Cydnee Welburn. "That's what we have in common with all our characters." She's also speaking of fellow cast members Bill Dawes, Josh Heine, and Kathy Searle, and of My First Time, a new play currently running at Off-Broadway's New World Stages. In 90 minutes, the actors work off a script derived from the real life first-time sexual experiences of scores of people who posted stories to www.myfirsttime.com.
"I'm a big fan of documentary theatre," explains Ken Davenport, My First Time's producer, director, and writer. "No matter where you are from, how much money you make, or how old you are, every single person on this planet is most likely going to have sex at some point in their life. It's something we all have in common, but the irony is, we don't like to talk about it. The mission statement of the piece was to say to everybody, 'Hey, we all do this, and it most likely kind of sucks for everyone, so let's just talk about it and laugh at it.' " Davenport — who created and directed The Awesome 80s Prom, and produced and co-conceived the long-running Altar Boyz — says he'd intended to create his own website for the purpose of soliciting stories of first-time experiences from ordinary people when he discovered MyFirstTime.com, created by Peter Foldy and Craig Stuart. So he acquired the rights to the site and got to work. "There were over 40,000 stories, so there was a lot of late-night clicking," he says. "And as exciting as that may sound, it wasn't. I felt like I was panning for gold. I was looking for the stories that were really authentic and what we could identify with."
My First Time, Davenport adds, "counts on the actors so much more than any other play. They have to be very versatile. One of the actors [Dawes] plays a 16-year-old boy in one moment and in the next, he's a guy in his 30s who gets his joy from date-raping young women, and then he plays a preacher. I count on those actors and on the audience watching and falling in love with them. I usually can cast very quickly because for me it's about the walk in the room and the first kind of exchanges they have with me. If they have the kind of personality that I want to hang out with them in a living room for an hour and a half, they are the right block of clay. I can sculpt them to what I want them to be for the show."
For the actors, working with a script not offering much in terms of character development or background was challenging. Heine, for example, says the group found the website itself helpful. "Many of the stories that made it into the show are much longer," he explains, "so we can go find them on the website, read the entire thing, and bring on stage little intricacies that we find there that are not necessarily in the script." Says Searle: "We came up with bits and pieces of [real-life contributors'] life stories and molded them ourselves and presented them to Ken." Says Welburn: "In a sense, it is more exciting and more fun because we can really go back to the drawing board." The great thing about Ken, she adds, "is that he allows you to take that journey as an actor, to try different things."
"I like to try and find a voice and from there work backwards," says Dawes. "I can color in more emotional life once I have figured out where this guy sat in his body." According to the actors, some character choices were based on clues derived from the online stories, whereas others were arbitrary. "There was a guy who I decided was from Boston," says Heine. "I don't know why, but I liked doing it, and there it is." Describing the accent he created for the preacher, Dawes jokes, "I went out on a limb and decided I'm going to make this guy Southern. I think we all wanted to do a little bit more accents than Ken would allow us to do." Davenport says, "This is an incredibly talented group of people, and since they didn't have a whole play, it's very easy for them to go to their bag of tricks. They actually didn't have to rely on a lot of that stuff. I said just be yourself and let your natural instincts take over."
The actors also rely on each other to keep the show's rhythm going. "I find that if I really listen and relax, I know that they all have my back, and then it can't go wrong," says Dawes. "We like each other — that's the most important thing," says Searle. "A friend of mine came to see the show and he said to me, 'The most wonderful part of the show was watching the actors in those moments of silence.' He said it didn't look as if we were obligated to watch one another; we were genuinely enjoying each other's work. There's still a line that Bill says about fucking his pillows that makes me break up. The audience is enjoying it and they are enjoying us enjoying it."
Adds Welburn, "We talk directly to the audience because we want them to be a part of the experience and we want it to be personal." My First Time also involves audiences by incorporating their comments: actors are handed cards, selected by a backstage crew, from surveys filled out before the show. "We don't see the cards until we are actually on stage," Heine notes.
At the end of the show, the actors add the names of their own first-time partners to the names culled from the audience. "I think we bring an element of ourselves into each character we do," says Searle, who relates how everybody discussed their own first time at the first rehearsal to break the ice. "It's such a vulnerable experience. That's what is so awesome about the show, because after every performance, all of a sudden, people start talking about sex."
My First Time is playing an open-ended run at New World Stages, 340 W. 50th St., NYC. For tickets, call (212) 239-6200 or (800) 432-7200.